Here are things I like today:

• YOU, dear reader. I like you. Probably.
• The following songs by Rhett Miller: "Lost Without You," "Long Long Long," "Marina," and "As Close as I Came to Being Right."
• Slipper socks
• The spine of my copy of Infinite Jest is so broken that the book will now lie flat. This makes it easy to eat lunch while reading.
• Meryl the greyhound likes her new bed, which means she no longer sleeps on my bed and growls at me in the middle of the night whenever I move. That was really starting to affect my quality of life.
• It is finally cold-ish! I am typing this wearing fingerless mittens because it is even colder inside the house.
• I turned on my old laptop and found this picture as the desktop wallpaper:

On Friday, I was in Tucson to train essay judges for an Academic Decathlon scrimmage. My relationship with Academic Decathlon is complicated. It shaped me a lot as a person, but for a long time I resented it because of things I gave up for it. I stopped seeing my friends when I was competing and studying, basically. After the season ended, I tried to hang out with them again, but it just felt like I had missed too much and had stopped knowing how to fit in. I felt this enormous sense of loss, like I had given up being a human in order to study six hours a day.

And that's still there, to a degree, but after all this time, I see other things, too. I see all the things I learned. I learned that talking in front of people would not kill me, that messing something up is not always equal to failure. I learned that, truly, I am a weird person -- like, I do things differently than other people. I had always suspected that last one, but it really became clear when I was spending four-ish hours a day around people who were (generally) closer to normal.